Projects

Berkeley Prosopography Services (BPS) is exploring and developing a prototype application to build prosopographical models that support research. The prototype focuses on a corpus of cuneiform tablets transcribed into Babylonian. The project originated as a collaboration between UC Berkeley's IST - Data Services group (now Research Information Technology) and the Near Eastern Studies Department.

Prosopography identifies and relates a group of persons or characters within a particular historical or literary context

UC Berkeley is a major partner in the development of CollectionSpace, an open source collections management application that meets the needs of museums, historical societies, and other collection-holding organizations.

CollectionSpace began as a collaborative project supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2013, CollectionSpace leadership partnered with LYRASIS to create an organizational home for the CollectionSpace platform.

Research IT staff are involved in managing the DiRT (Digital Research Tools) directory, a longstanding, well-regarded source of information about tools available to support scholarship in the humanities. Originally developed as a wiki, DiRT was completely rebuilt in 2011, allowing each tool to have a unique "profile" page. The new structure enables browsing, sorting and searching the entire directory using granularly-stored information including tool category, cost, license, and developer.

Sponsored by UC Berkeley Research Information Technologies and Academic Engagement/ETS, RAE Portfolio Planning in its initial phase was a four-month project (July - November 2013) to review our entire portfolio of existing and planned technology services. This work was undertaken in support of our goal to ensure the highest quality services to support research and teaching. We assigned teams of researchers to examine twenty three service areas (see list below) and work with campus stakeholders to draft findings and initial recommendations.

Consultation with campus leaders and stakeholders is ongoing in the RIT Futures project, described on this site.

Reviews of the kind conducted in 2013 will recur on a periodic basis as we continuously evaluate technology services and opportunities to improve.

One of Research IT’s primary responsibilities is to help campus leaders to develop strategic plans to improve research IT support over the next three to five years. We want to ensure that UC Berkeley has the best possible research IT services given the reality of campus financial constraints.